How to Reduce Bounce Rate?
Can you do anything which make someone visiting your blog/site for the first time and stick to it for hours, can you glued your visitors with some tools so that they find it difficult to leave your blog. Its not a question whether you can do it or not but somehow you need to make your visitors should not leave your blog/site quickly. Technically when people left your site from the same page they enter is called “Bounce”. You must do all efforts to lowering down this rate.
knowing about your site bounce rate is very simple, register your site with Google analytics and you can see and monitor your site bounce rate from there. If say your site bounce rate is showing up 90% it means that 90% of the users coming to your site are quickly glancing around and leaving, deciding immediately that this site isn’t for them.
Google define bounce rate as;
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run.
Frankly speaking if a visitor who landed on your site while searching for something which is not there ( that happens very rarely ) then you can’t do much about it but most of the time you can always control and your lower bounce rate if they arrive searching with the relevant keywords related to your blog niche.
I am not giving you here some philosiphical measures to reduce bounce rate, I am not preaching about why your bounce rate is low but i am suggesting you about some WordPress Plugin which will definitely help you out to lower your site bounce rate. Here are some WordPress Plugins to take control of your site bounce rate;
Insights
The best way to keep your visitors engage in reading your blog is to internally link important keywords phrases in your current posts to your older relevant posts. Insight plugin help you do this job superbly. Tell me how you find your old posts for linking, may be you search it in your own site open it, copy the URL and link it in current post, and when you don’t have much time in your hand you usually skip this step but believe me if you are doing it in that old fashion way then this plugin is life saver for you.
Insights allows you to do all this using dynamic AJAX interface which loads the relevant posts to link it in just a few seconds. It saves your time and increase productivity.
- It Searches your blog for posts, insert links to them into the current post
- Search Flickr Images for your search keyword
- Insert Youtube videos
- Search and link to Wikipedia
- Search Google
- Search News
- Google Blog Search
- You can also have an option to Insert a Google Map
So if you have written tons of great posts on your blog this post give you an easy way to link them with relevant keywords and phases in your current blog post.
Related Post Plugin
Displaying related post is another important tool which help you to make your reader get involve into other posts on similar topic. There are many related Post plugin there in WordPress Plugin Repository, I use this related posts plugin from last couple of years. It pulls out related posts in same category which ultimately help readers to get into the depth of that topic by offering more posts on topic.
Link Within related posts with thumbnails
A picture speaks thousand words so why not display some more related posts with thumbnail images. If your have posts salacious photos as Seth Godin suggested then this plugin could earn you some more page views. People love to click on salacious images, no matter they are in hurry or have some urgent task at hand. 
You can download this plugin here
- Another attempt to keep readers “Stay tuned” on your blog.
These big sites uses related post thumbnail on their single post pages;
Popular Posts Plugin
I remember how I started my blogging, a three years back when I landed on John Chow’s blog while searching for “money” related keyword on Google it was his Top Post page which kept me surfing through various top class posts all day long. Surely if a visitor impress with your writing skill he must wish to read some more great stuff from you and your top posts or popular posts page serve him the dose he need.
I use a plugin for showing most popular posts on my blog and configured it to show up top posts of last 30 days, its highly customizable sidebar widget displays the most popular posts on your blog.
So if you really want to impress a new visitor then what can be better than to serve them your best.
These were some plugins which help lowering down bounce rate. These are practical solutions to a higher bounce rate problem which can be a major headache for any blogger struggling with higher bounce rate.
Most click-able area in a website
So as you have seen that placing related posts text links and thumbnails help you reducing bounce rate. After reading the complete post that is the only area where readers looks for some more interesting information. Now I will try to show live example you how these popular bloggers are doing it.
- Famous Bloggers Sidebar and Post Footer Area
A bunch of smart bloggers created a multi-authors blog and Social Network platform for making money online. ( Smart Idea!). Above is a screen shot of fomousbloggers.net post footer and sidebar, you can see that both post footer and sidebar have thumbnail images of related posts and popular posts. Plus some more related posts shown above comment area to keep the reader engage in reading and surfing through the blog. it seems that they believe that an image can attract more then showing plain text links and thats very true as I said it before people are more keen to dig through an image unless you really know the art of writing wire titles for your posts.
- Related Posts, Recent Posts , Ramdom Posts – Shout Me Loud
Now have a look at the sidebar and single post footer of tech blog Shout Me Loud by my friend Harsh Aggarwal, you will notice there are enough data links floating around while you read through posts. There are related posts given at the end of the post for In-depth sight on subject then there are random posts and recent posts in sidebar, but if you would surf through various posts you will find a very smart inter-linking has been placed with relevant anchor keywords within posts and that always help you to lower down your site bounce rate.
Write Effective Headlines
This is what google suggest you to do, I also told you about Writing headlines as you are a wire service writer attract readers, if you place these related posts, random posts widgets and those posts have weired or effective headlines chances are that readers will surely hit it.
other thing to remember while writing effective headlines as suggested by Google
- Include keyword in the headline.
- Headings should not sound like an ad
- Highlight benefits rather than features.
- Make headlines look easy to read.
Hope the above tools and measure will help you lower your site bounce rate. share in comment below your experience with bounce rate and what you think works better.
13 Responses to “How to Reduce Bounce Rate?”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Tweets that mention How to Reduce Bounce Rate? | Shanker Bakshi dot Com -- Topsy.com - [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by shankerbakshi, shankerbakshi. shankerbakshi said: New Blog Post How to Reduce Bounce Rate? ...
- Featured in MMO Social Network - Story added... Your story was featured in Featured in MMO Social Network! Here is the link to vote it up and ...
Very useful read Shanker,
I actually did the long list of recent blog posts on the sidebar of famousbloggers.net to make sure that visitors will find more interesting stuff to read, and I can see them click on it more often through CrazyEgg which tells me where they click on the site!
I recently added thumbnails to to post footer because I believe of the power of images, and I am experiencing more page impressions!
I’ve also read in David Risley’s blog that we can maximize the attractiveness of our about us page to lower bounce rate. This is because our about us page is one of the most frequently visited places in our site. We can do this by making this page more human and interesting, plus we can add in a link to join our newsletter
Great post! Although I would disagree slightly with your bounce rate averages, in that 30-40% would be considered industry average and acceptable, where as anything over 40% needs improvement, over 60% and there is a major issue.
Thanks mr. bakshi.Bounce rate can tell you that readers aren’t reading your articles or very many of them, if you write really short posts like 50 words or so, you can have a high bounce rate and still have your content read, but if you average 200-400 words per article and have a high bounce rate you know that majority of visitors are skimming your title or first paragraph and moving on.
You too Brutus!! Another Thesis fan.. When did you move to Thesis?
Nice tips on bounce rate. The only time I like a high bounce rate is when someone lands on my landing page directly converts into a sales via an affiliate click
Yes, Ajith fallen prey to Thesis, switched last month.
I assume some sites will have naturally high bounce rate depending on their content and structure even though they can still be a valuable resource.
Some nice point covered by you Shankar.
Insight plugin is something which I highly recommend to every one, another one which one can use is SEO smart plugin or simple tags plugin, which is useful for auto linking..
One major factor is your blog load time.. if your blog take ages to load..no one is gng to stick to it…
Nice post Shankar. I have a doubt in mind. What do you think will be the average bounce rate? My site loading time is pretty quick than others, but still I have 49% bounce rate. Do u think this is high or its just an average?
frankly speaking there is no fixed rule for this, but usually a bounce rate between 25% to 35% can be a acceptable limit and anything beyond 75% is a thing to worry.
There is actually no hard and fast rule for this, to me anything between 35% to 45% is acceptable and anything beyond 75% is a thing to worry.
Once again Shanker, you’ve wrote a really usefull post.
I’ve been struggling alot in the last time, to reduce the bounce rate on one of my blogs, and this article gives a pretty good resumé of some of the basics, that are easy to forget.
Also a great plugin, im sure that it will become handy
thanks
Awesome post Shankar.My bounce rate is 70% and i have to optimize my site by related post.I have just installed Insight plugin.Once again thanks for a great post.